Salomón felt secure he was free of the susto he contracted in OJ when the mannequin he had stared at in the church on the plaza glared back at him. After months of searching for the devil in the allies of the Southside to cantarle as a cure, he came across what he was certain was the devil posing as a solicitous black dog. He lobbed a quick reproach, and the devil dog scampered away. His friends arrived soon after to rescue him.
All was good for Salomón, then it wasn’t. He’d been cruising the vuelta in his uncle’s lowrider one sunny Sunday afternoon in the Southside. Everything was de aquellas. The weather and the sparkling ramflas looked a toda madres. No bronca of any kind to be concerned about. Then suddenly, a black dog went by in a ramfla going the other way.
It took Salomón a few seconds to get the image straight in his mind. The same black dog he’d confronted in the alley. In the back seat of a car with its head sticking out the window. A polished black lowrider?
“Wait. A lowrider wouldn’t have a dog riding in the back seat,” Salomón told himself.
He looked for a break in the train of cars to try a u-turn. A couple of minutes later, he turned around and went after the black car with the black dog. He passed many cars all the way to the restaurant parking lot where everybody turned and went back into the vuelta.
Salomón was baffled. The black car couldn’t have been that far ahead. He should’ve either passed or seen it coming in the opposite lane. The puzzle pushed him to pass cars more quickly. He did this all evening until the traffic disappeared late in the night.
He did the same the following Sunday and all the Sundays that followed through the winter and spring. The black car with the black dog never re-appeared.
His obsession didn’t subside until he attended a wedding and spotted a ruca in a gold shirt dotted with faces of a black dog. Salomón walked up to her and, without thinking, asked if indeed those were black dogs on her shirt.
“You see it? You’re the first one,” she said.
They looked at each other silently a long while.
“Wanna dance?” she eventually asked him.
They danced all night. The next day, they went on a date and were inseparable from then on. With her at his side, Salomón calmed down in the vueltas. They married soon after high school a few years later.
“Gonna throw away the gold shirt you like. Too worn out,” she told him years into their marriage.
Salomón didn’t complain. But he wondered. Had he been wrong about the black dog or simply given into its spell?
“Con safos either way,” he told himself.
